Posts Tagged ‘Congolese Refugees’

When I first began writing this blog in July 2007, one of the issues that attracted my attention was the puzzling decision by the Virginia Council of Churches, working for major resettlement contractor Church World Service, to place refugees in one of the worst buildings in the worst section of Hagerstown, MD.

But, here we are 11 years later and Church World Servicehas placed Congolese refugees in Greensboro, NC in housing that is managed by a company that has a record of many years of troubling business practices.

I’m sure CWS rejoinder is—well give us more taxpayer money and we will get them nicer apartments.

And, I say, this was supposed to be a public-private partnership, so how about you, CWS, raising private money from your churches to help these Africans you placed (so that North Carolina meatpackers could have cheap compliant labor)!

We told you the outrageous news here where we learned that a Congolese refugee had his charges dismissed because the judge found him culturally incompetent (he abused women, beat his wife, in his native DR Congo so how could we expect him to know better!).

Augustin Bahati will be back in court later this month when they find an interpreter.

The case has been refiled, but delayed when an interpreter didn’t show up in court.

Just a reminder that refugees are entitled to expensive interpreters (often supplied by a refugee contractor***) that you pay for with your tax dollars (costs NEVER reported in glowing studies of how refugees are good for the economy!).

MANCHESTER — A court hearing for a Congolese refugee on domestic-related criminal charges refiled by city prosecutors was postponed Thursday because there wasn’t an interpreter available.

Augustin Bahati was there for the status hearing Thursday morning in 9th Circuit Court-District Division and sat in the courtroom for several hours because the interpreter scheduled to translate during the proceedings did not show.

The case against Bahati was dismissed in March because he was deemed “culturally incompetent” to understand the American justice system. Acting City Solicitor Emily Gray Rice, who was also in the courtroom waiting for the interpreter, submitted paperwork last month to refile the charges against Bahati.

Here is another story on Bahati where his resettlement agency claims he was given a training program that warned against domestic abuse.

I quickly looked around to see if I could find what language Bahati spoke, but didn’t see it immediately. Wikipedia tells us that French is the official national language followed by other obscure languages. Is your welcoming town ready to supply costly interpreters?

For those of you being told that refugees don’t commit crimes or plan terrorist attacks—see my ten cases, here. This one is small potatoes in comparison to the five horrific crimes I added to the ten terror cases.

***The Federal contractors/middlemen/employment agencies/propagandists/lobbyists/community organizers?paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities are below. Under the nine major contractors are hundreds of subcontractors.

The contractors income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US, but they also receive myriad grants to service their “New Americans.”

They aren’t on the street, but live in temporary housing (what! some motel?).

I can’t believe this! After all the hoopla and excitement about shoving refugees down the throats of Montanans who don’t want the poverty and cultural disruption third worlders bring to communities, the mightyInternational Rescue Committee (IRC) headquartered in New York City doesn’t have homes and apartments lined up for the former camp-dwelling Congolese whose arrival has been predicted for months!

That is David Miliband in the middle giving George Soros and his son the IRC’s top award in 2013. LOL! It is called the Freedom Award. Miliband, a British citizen, runs the major US resettlement contractor with a salary of almost $600,000 a year. Maybe he, or Soros, could co-sign leases for the poor Africans being brought to Montana.

Where is Missoula’s R & P Abstract, did the IRC lie to the US State Department about the availability of reasonably priced housing for large families?

Didn’t the IRC sign a contract with the US State Department that said the refugees must have a home (with a requirement for a certain number of bedrooms for family members) to go to from the airport with the refrigerator stocked with culturally appropriate food?

When do-gooders don’t do good!

I’m going to rage a bit before I give you some snips from The Missoulian(Missoula Refugees face housing issues).

The International Rescue Committee is a behemoth in the Refugee Industry. It is the richest of the nine federal contractors with an annual income in 2014 of $688,920,920 and $454 million of that comes from YOU, the taxpayer. Its CEO, Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband*** is making $591,846 annually and probably lives in some swanky digs in Manhattan! (See recent Form 990 here)

But, the IRC refuses to co-sign the housing rental agreements with the refugees they are dropping off in Missoula!

It is an outrage! They expect local landlords to waive their rules for the refugeesthat obviously have no credit and no background checks and no job prospects and take a gamble on them that they can pay the rent for months and years to come! Not to mention the fact that over the last nine years I’ve heard many stories, especially about refugees who have lived in camps, that they do not know how to use modern appliances and often trash them in the process of learning how to operate dish washers, stoves, etc.

Congolese refugees and the people trying to help them get settled in Missoula are facing a housing crisis.

Five families from refugee camps in East Africa will be in town by the end of September, none of them with a source of steady income or credit history.

It’s the job of the local resettlement agency, the International Rescue Committee, to help them secure both as quickly as possible, said IRC director Molly Short Carr.

But record home sales prices in Missoula have placed rentals at a premium. And in a town that swells this time of year with university students – many with no credit ratings themselves – property managers and landlords can afford to be picky about who they rent to.

“We’re kind of hitting a bit of a brick wall,” Carr admitted.

[….]

Missoula has been approved [Why were they approved by the Dept. of State if housing was not available?—ed] as the destination for families of five, four and three people – 25 refugees in all – in the next few weeks, so the hunt for housing is becoming critical.

What a bunch of B.S. this is! We are expected to believe that local landlords should carry the burden of helping teach refugees how to be self-sufficient! Continue reading:

The IRC doesn’t allow its offices to co-sign for refugees.

“Our focus is really on getting them self-sufficient,” said Carr. “Co-signing is kind of a contradiction to self-sufficiency and being able to guide their own lives.”

Hey, here is an idea! maybe Mary Poole and other members of her group could take on the responsibility of co-signing rental agreements with landlords for the families they have ‘welcomed’ to Montana! Maybe put a little of their own skin in the game!

Readers!

If your town is contemplating ‘welcoming’ refugees, please pay attention. The uber-wealthy resettlement contractor will be out of the refugees’ lives in only a few months and the burden of these third world families will be on you—the taxpayers, the landlords, the social services, the school system and the health services of your town!

***David Miliband is a pal of the Clintons,click here for many posts we have written about him in recent years. BTW, Miliband was the first of the resettlement contractors to call for 65,000 Syrians for America before Obama leaves office and he subsequently joined the chorus for an even larger number.

Addendum: After I posted this I thought you might be interested to know that Anne Richard (Asst. Secretary of State for PRM) and Robert Carey (Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement) were both former Vice Presidents at the IRC pulling down 6-figure salaries and are now the two top officials responsible for the entire US Refugee Admissions Program (the revolving door between government and contractor on full display).

Update:Soros spent $600,000 on a pro-refugee PR campaign in Europe (see here). How many refugees might he have helped personally with that kind of money? Or maybe Miliband would forego that huge salary and help needy refugees with it! Nah, he needs it to maintain the jet-setting lifestyle!

Catholic Charities in Utah is recruiting volunteers who look like the Congolese!

Many people believe that Utah is resettling refugees through the Mormon church. Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints encourages the resettlement of refugees, including Muslim refugees, it is actually the Catholic Church in charge here.

An aside: every time I see something from Utah I wonder who had the bright idea to place a Burmese Muslim refugee in an apartment complex filled with Burmese Christians. The end result was the brutal murder of a little Christian girl and now the taxpayers of Utah get to pay for Esar Met’s life in prison.

We have been writing about new resettlement sites lately (Rutland, VT, Reno, NV, Ithaca, NY) as the federal government and its refugee contractors are scrambling for new places in which to seed third world diversity. Now it is Ogden Utah’s turn.

The community is invited to a meeting for future volunteers to gear up to welcome refugees from the Congo beginning sometime this summer.

A refugee resettlement conversation is planned for 6 p.m to 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 23, at the Marshall White Center, 222 28th Street in Ogden.

“We want to involve Ogden’s diverse communities with this initiative,” said Jenny Gnagey, community awareness building specialist for Catholic Community Services and also an assistant professor of economics at Weber State University. “We want to be able to connect these refugees with people that look like them.”

[….]

“Each year, Catholic Community Services resettles 600 refugees from all around the world in the state of Utah,” Gnagey said. “This summer we are expanding our resettlement efforts to the Ogden community. In the coming year, we expect that Ogden will receive approximately 20 primarily Congolese refugee families.”

They must have problems in Utah with landlords fearful of renting to refugees or they wouldn’t be saying this:

Catholic Community Services also is looking for landlords who will rent to these families.

The rental agreement comes with supervision of Catholic Community Services to assure that the families fulfill their obligations.

“If you rent to a refugee and they have any issue, we will be there to support them,” Batar said. “We want to assure landlords that they don’t have to worry.”

Batar wants future landlords to know that the refugees coming to Ogden are legally documented new American citizens. [To be accurate, they aren’t US citizens until they go through the citizenship process—ed]

Most of the Congolese refugees entering the US right now are from the DR Congo. We committed to taking 50,000 of them, here in 2013.

Below is a map (source: US State Department Refugee Processing Center) of where 20,967 of them have been placed in the last 4 years. (Over 29,000 yet to be placed by the State Dept. target date of 2019!)

Please note that only a small number (846) are Muslims, but many Christian faiths are represented. I wanted to mention that here because there are some misunderstandings flying around that all of our refugees are Muslims, they aren’t!

However, remember as we learned here, many from the DR Congo are women with (costly) mental health needs, and they likely won’t be supporting their families anytime soon.

Update June 6th:World Net Daily wrote about this yesterday, here. Also, be sure to see the exchange of comments to this post which we highlight here.

It is not really World Reliefso much as the Obama State Department and Secretary of State John Kerry. Gowdy had asked that no refugees be resettled in his district until his many questions had been answered to his satisfaction. See our post yesterdayabout the inadequate response Gowdy has received so far.

The refugees from DR Congo*** resettled in Spartanburg apparently about a week or so ago could just as easily have been taken to any one of 190 (more!) cities in the US, but clearly the State Department is sending a message to Gowdy—(expletive you!).

As we said previously, Spartanburg is pivotal in the battle for determining who controls the resettlement process—will the UN/US State Department ram third-worlders down the throats of small town America, or will cities and states play any role in the present secretive resettlement process?

If anyone has any power in Congress on this issue, it is Gowdy. The question is, is he willing to exercise his power?

In this pivotal showdown, score one for Secretary of State John Kerry!

Jason Lee, director of World Relief Spartanburg, said two refugees from the Congo arrived in Spartanburg in late May. He would not provide a specific date, citing security reasons. He pointed out that they are persecuted.

Meanwhile, Rep. Trey Gowdy called the U.S. State Department’s response to his latest questions about a resettlement agency’s plan to sponsor refugees in Spartanburg “sorely inadequate.”

Gowdy has invited the federal agency to brief elected officials on the refugee resettlement.

The Republican congressman issued a statement Wednesday after receiving the State Department’s response.

Gowdy has written the federal agency twice to obtain details about plans to sponsor refugees in Spartanburg. World Relief, a faith-based refugee resettlement agency, opened a Spartanburg office earlier this year. The state Department of Social Services approved Spartanburg as a new refugee resettlement site, according to the State Department’s response.

World Relief Spartanburg has been authorized to resettle up to 60 refugees in the 2015 fiscal year. [FY2015 ends on September 30, 2015, so they should be coming in pretty quickly now—ed]

If you visit the State Department’s data base, here, we have admitted only 34 refugees from the Congo this fiscal year, but 2,921 this fiscal year so far from DR Congo. So again, we assume Spartansburg’s new American “seedlings” are from DR Congo.

The majority from the DR Congo are not Muslims although a few are as we reported here.

A large number from DR Congo are abused women and children. We learned, here, that many of the women need extensive mental health care due to the abuse they have suffered.

By the way, the UN is always in a hurry to clean out its camps and send refugees to the first world rather than waiting out conflicts and then returning refugees to their homes or to countries with a similar culture. However, in the irony of ironies, they are not in any hurry to resettle Palestinians (that is good for us!) leaving them in ‘camps’ on the border of Israel in order to harass that country for the last 6 decades.

It is also interesting to me because we rarely see articles about refugee resettlement contractor Episcopal Migration Ministries, one of the top nine. Apparently they are less media savvy as they rarely turn up in news stories (like this one) intended to be puff pieces on refugees.

We previously reported on the great need for mental health services for women from DR Congo, here.

A Congolese refugee, Zaburiya arrived in Tucson seven months ago with five children, aged 10 to 26, after spending 18 years in a refugee camp in Rwanda.

Illiterate and not speaking a word of English, she became a member of a women’s empowerment group operated by Refugee Focus, which receives support from The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society’s Episcopal Migration Ministries service through funding from the United States government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.

(The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society is the legal and canonical name under which The Episcopal Church is incorporated, conducts business, and carries out mission.)***

[….]

Through Episcopal Migration Ministries, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society partners with 30 resettlement affiliates in 26 dioceses nationwide. It is one of nine agencies working in partnership with the U.S. Department of State to welcome and resettle refugees to the United States.

For the umpteenth time, the UN is picking our refugees!

In 2014, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society and its partners worked to resettle 5,155 of the tens of thousands of refugees who came to the United States through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) screening process.

[….]

Over the next several years, UNHCR plans to resettle 50,000 refugees from the Congo, with 70 to 90 percent to be resettled to the United States,said Kurt Bonz, Episcopal Migration Ministries’ program manager…

[….]

“Most of the refugees have been in camps an average of 20 years, education is low, and many are single women with children who continue to experience trauma related to living in the Congo, the journey out and living in a refugee camp,” he said.

So who are these refugees from DR Congo and where are they going?

We resettled 9,022 Congolese refugee “seedlings” in that approximate 2 and 1/2 year period. Most were Christians of some sort, but I was surprised to learn that 356 were Muslims (from DR Congo?).

Then here is a list of the states that received over 200 Congolese refugees over that same 2 and 1/2 year time period (apparently all of these states have run out of American poor people to care for):

Arizona (862)

Colorado (290)

Florida (236)

Georgia (398)

Idaho (303)

Illinois (339)

Kentucky (405)

Maryland (259)

Massachusetts (322)

Michigan (417)

Missouri (301)

New Hampshire (260)

New York (325)

North Carolina (379)

Ohio (288)

Pennsylvania (445)

Texas (1078) Working hard to turn Texas blue!

Utah (200)

Washington (273)

*** When you visit this post, you will see more about why this structure of the Episcopal Migration Ministries makes it hard to track their finances. They must be claiming they are a ‘church’ and as such do not have to do a Form 990.

Reader Robin sent us this on Wednesday, but I didn’t post earlier simply because I didn’t want to sound mean by begrudging anyone a nice Thanksgiving dinner, but today is different—call me mean if it makes you feel better!

You should know that one of the favorite PR gambits of the US refugee resettlement contractors is to get lovely refugees-first-Thanksgiving stories published at this time of year. They are masters at planting warm and fuzzy propaganda, and that is one reason we write this blog—LOL! to balance the news!

John Koehlinger, Director Kentucky Refugee Ministries: “This is the one holiday we feel like all of the clients can celebrate.” Does he mean whether they are Muslims or Christians?

If you search around today, you will see that stories were published in several cities about the generosity of the contractors (no doubt using your tax dollars!) in feeding a scrumptious dinner to newly arrived refugees (their “clients”). But, that isn’t why I’m writing. There were a few lines in the USA Todaystory that got my attention and I want to share them with you.

Remember that legitimate asylum seekers must be able to prove persecution (for religion, race, or political persuasion) when they get to the first SAFE COUNTRY after leaving their place of persecution. They are to ask for asylum in that first safe country. They aren’t supposed to be hopping around the world from safe country to safe country shopping for the best deal!

So why the hell are we taking black African “refugees” from the Rainbow Nation of South Africa which was supposedly built on the notion that no matter what color you were, you were in a country that WELCOMED everyone!

Mulungula “Nico” Mungela is the Congolese ‘star of the story’ (this must be J-school 101, put a sympathetic character in your opening paragraph!) at USA Today and in 2006 he left DR Congo and arrived in South Africa—the Rainbow Nation—a SAFE country.

Now does this sound like a “refugee?” Within 3 years he had two new Master’s degrees, and a good college instructor job in the Rainbow Nation. Are we to believe that all that equality talk from Nelson Mandela was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo? (It may be for South African whites, but Mungela was a black man in a country run by all black leaders!).

By the way, this isn’t to criticize Mr. Mungela who just took advantage of a good thing, it is to question UNHCR and US State Department policy that has become a lawless free-for-all policy without any supervision by Congress where we are just slapping on that refugee label and bringing them in from anywhere!

His journey took him south through Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and finally into South Africa, by bus, boat, ship, and hitching rides. He was robbed once right in the middle of a road in Tanzania.

Through a Congo pastor who’d rescued him from the beach, he landed a job as a parking lot guard in Durban. Later, after he sent for his family, he secured a loan to return to college and earned two master’s degrees.

Although he and his wife could support their family — he through a college instructor’s job working with special-needs students and Dorcas by operating a home day care — the family still struggled to gain a foothold. The country is still rife with discrimination, Mungela said. [What! The Rainbow Nation discriminates against blacks? Has anyone told Obama that the whole Mandela rainbow thing is a myth?—ed]

In May 2009, the couple applied for refugee status and resettlement through the International Organization for Migration, which partners with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Their category covers survivors of violence.

So now he and his 8 kids largely live on your dime in Kentucky. Wouldn’t it have been of greater benefit to South Africa to leave a well-educated man there to help South Africa?

What are we thinking! We resettled 322 UN designated “refugees” from South Africa in the first month of FY2015 alone! See here. I bet not one of them is white, or even Asian, they are likely all black fellow African brothers!

About the photoand Kentucky Refugees Ministries. In its most recent Form 990 KRM took in $4,703,422 from government contracts as part of a total revenue stream of $5,287,956 which means they are 89% funded by taxpayer dollars in a Wilson Fish state where the resettlement program is run by the federal government’s contractors (with no say by elected representatives of the state government of Kentucky).

When you visit that Form 990 be sure to check out the costs of running this ‘non-profit’ for salaries, office expenses, travel etc.

The Centers for Disease Control has some reports you might like to see if Bhutanese and/or Congolese refugees are being resettled in your towns. This could be important information needed by your local health department.

The refugee health profiles found on this page provide key health and cultural information for specific refugee groups resettling to the United States. Information gathered from the World Health Organization (WHO), International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), US Department of State, and other sources is provided to help resettlement agencies, clinicians, and public health providers facilitate medical screening and interventions appropriate for each refugee group.

That is a possibility presented by Aaron Klein writing at World Net Daily this week, here. Hat tip: several readers.

We briefly noted the fact that Ebola, although supposedly a different strain than the one making the news, is present in DR Congo.

And, we are bringing a huge number of Congolese refugees (DR Congo) to America at the UNHCR’s urging—50,000 by 2019, see our post yesterday.

We admitted 4,540 Congolese refugees to the US in FY2014 which ended on Sept. 30th, 2014 (go here, map is incorrect, scroll down to table).

However, I think a greater long-term threat to America is what we reported yesterday—Congolese women in need of mental health treatment raising children in some impoverished home in your town or city.

Remember readers! Refugee health treatment is the responsibility of your local health departments! See our health issues category here for what other diseases and health problems (including mental health) you are responsible for.

From World Net Dailywhich is becoming the go-to major internet news source*** for refugee news (something we are very grateful to see):

Since an outbreak of Ebola hit the Democratic Republic of the Congo in July, the Obama administration has brought into the U.S. at least 1,900 refugees from the disease-stricken nation, WND has learned.

Required medical screening for refugees may not detect all diseases. The mandatory blood and urine tests for all refugees would not detect Ebola.

The strain of Ebola found in the Congo is slightly different from the virus that has been ravaging West Africa. Researchers have concluded the Congolese outbreak is not connected to the epidemic in West Africa.

The U.S. refugee program this year is on pace to resettle 70,000 citizens, including a limit for the fiscal year of 2014 of 14,000 from Africa, with the State Department giving priority to Congolese refugees.

Since July, at least 1,900 Congolese refugees have been resettled within the U.S., according to statistics provided by the State Department.

A report from the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration shows 944 refugees were admitted from the Congo in July; 628 in August and 338 in September, for a total of 1,910 Congolese refugees.

The exact number of arrivals from the Congo for this month are not yet published. However, the total number of October arrivals so far from the region of Africa, according to the State Department, is 934, with most likely coming from the Congo.

The Congo has had its own outbreak of Ebola that started in late-July reportedly after a hunter brought home an infected bush animal carcass. Since then, 49 people have died in the Congo.

We told you here in June of 2013that the US was aiming to resettle 50,000 Congolese (DR Congo) refugees over the next few years and the US State Department has been busy, busy, busy getting the flow started. Indeed this article tells us something we didn’t know—they want to get the 50,000 here by 2019!

If you visit the statistics at the Refugee Processing Center(US State Department) you will see that at the close of Fiscal year 2014 on September 30th, we resettled 4,540 from the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the year (Don’t look at the map where someone has left out DR Congo! or case numbers, look at individuals numbers listed for DR Congo in chart below map).

Apparently enough of them are here to begin studying their needs, in this case, their need for costly mental health treatment (also needed by the Bhutanese). The report (partially funded by the UN) suggests “leveraging local resources.” Of course that means the feds aren’t going to pay for it—state and local taxpayers will! Wyoming are you listening!

Anne Richard, US State Department and Antonio Guterres head of UNHCR. The UN is calling the shots on Congolese resettlement to America. Richard to Socialist Guterres: Jump? How high?

AUSTIN, Texas — The U.S. government must do more to address the needs of Congolese refugee “women at risk” through trauma-related services and social support, according to a report by the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (IDVSA) at The University of Texas at Austin and the Department of Sociology & Social Work at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

The report issued recommendations for the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which is responsible for resettling 50,000 Congolese refugees in the United States by 2019. The recommendations are based on a study of refugee women from the Democratic Republic of Congo who have resettled in the United States after decades of unrest in their homeland.

“The women who participated in our study experienced multiple traumas and hardship,” said Noël Busch-Armendariz, lead author of the report and director of IDVSA in The University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work. “This study provides empirical evidence to inform the tremendous efforts already underway to meet the needs of Congolese female refugees.”

Although the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program emphasizes economic integration through job placement, the report finds that many refugee women had unmet needs for trauma-related services, social support and longer-time financial support, said IDVSA researcher and project director Karin Wachter. The study was partially funded by a $15,000 grant from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). [So the UN is basically telling Americans to spend more money on this problem they created for us!—ed]

Leveraging and long-term service = your money!

“Access to long-term services to address trauma and loss is essential for this population,” said Maura B. Nsonwu, the lead researcher from North Carolina A&T. “The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program could leverage local resources for these services, such as domestic violence and sexual assault centers in cities who receive Congolese refugees.”

So what does the US get out of this arrangement when mentally-impaired single mothers raise large numbers of children in your town?